Before breaking down these proposals, it is worth remembering that our current system is horribly complicated, making compliance costs exorbitant. It is incredibly unfair, extending privileges to some at the expense of others. There is no equality before the taxman.

Genuine tax reform would expand and simplify the tax base by getting rid of the thousands of loopholes to special interest groups. It would lower the top marginal rates and end the double taxation on saving and investment. It should restore some horizontal equity (two people making the same income paying the same taxes). It would also make as many provisions permanent — and predictable — as possible.

Good tax reform would require the federal government to make adjustments in spending, the way states and the District of Columbia operate, so the amount of tax collected more or less covers spending for a given year.

The House version goes after a large number of tax exemptions, breaks, credits and deductions that make our code so complicated and unfair. It takes some significantly steps to reduce the mortgage interest deductions. It also gets rid of most — with the exception of a $10,000 deduction — of the state and local tax deductions (SALT). Pretty impressive moves considering ending tax deductions is usually where tax reform goes to die.

The House plan doubles the standard deduction, meaning dramatically fewer taxpayers will itemize their taxes.

The Senate plan also doubles the standard deduction. (an estimated 90 percent of filers making under $200K would now claim the standard deduction). It gets rid of SALT entirely, but is more timid on the mortgage interest deductions. Moreover, it preserves many of the tax breaks with which the House dispenses. And rather than making the tax changes permanent, it includes a sunset date of 2025 reverting the standard deduction, the estate tax, the child tax credit, SALT, the pass-through deduction, and individual tax rates to 2017 levels.

President Trump’s intention to give a real tax break to the middle class is counter-productive considering the middle class barely shoulders any of the income tax as it is. The top 10 percent of income earners — households making $133K, not $1 million as most assume — currently pay more than 70 percent of all income tax revenue. The middle quintile pays, on average, 2.6 percent of the federal income tax.

And yet, in both the House and Senate plans the middle class receives the largest tax relief by reducing their marginal tax rates, increasing the child tax credit and doubling the standard deduction. The result is fewer taxpayers would be paying income tax at all, problematic from a small government perspective. It also means a more progressive income tax code than it already is.

[...]

Both plans cut the corporate income tax rate from its current 35 percent level to 20 percent. The Senate version implements the cut in 2019, the House version in 2018. Both have the good sense to make the change permanent. This is the most pro-growth/wage change. This is a measure worth passing to make the country tax environment more competitive.

Gri-gri comes in many forms — ointment, powder, necklaces — but all promise immunity to weaponry. It doesn’t work on individuals, of course, although it’s supposed to. Very little can go grain-for-grain with black powder and pyrodex. It does work on communities: it makes them bullet proof.

The economists Nathan Nunn and Raul Sanchez de la Sierra wrote a paper analyzing the social effects of gri-gri: Why Being Wrong Can Be Right: Magical Warfare Technologies and the Persistence of False Beliefs (the full paper is up on Professor Sanchez de la Sierra’s site). Here’s the breakdown: Bullet-proofing magic is relatively widespread throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper focuses on Congo-Kinsasha, specifically South Kivu. Things are not great there: “In July 2007, United Nations human rights expert Yakin Erturk called the situation in South Kivu the worst she has ever seen in four years as the global body’s special investigator for violence against women.” The quote from wikipedia gets way worse, trust me. Most of the villages lack larger forms of protection, as is probably obvious at this point. They also lacked any kind of coordinated resistance, and given the larger fire power, were hopelessly outgunned. That was for some time, and our wiki quote says 2007.

In 2012, the recipe for gri-gri was revealed to an elder in a dream. If you ingest it and follow certain ritual commandments, then bullets cannot harm you. The belief is puzzling, inasmuch as bullets did seem to keep killing people. More puzzling: not only did it survive, it was adopted by many neighboring villages, cities, and regions. “Why?”

The paper argues that gri-gri encourages resistance on a mass scale. Beforehand, given a mix of brave and cowardly, only a small percentage of a village would fight back. If you want to have any hope of surviving, then you need everyone to fight back. Gri-gri lowers the perceived costs of said resistance, i.e. no reason to fear guns when the bullets can’t hurt you. Now everyone fights, hence, gri-gri‘s positive benefits. Moreover: since more people are fighting, each gri-gri participant also raises the marginal utility of the others (it’s better to fight together). And, since there are highly specific requirements for using the powder (if you break a certain moral code it doesn’t work), gri-gri also probably cuts down on non-war related crimes. Take group-level selection: the belief in and use of gri-gri will thus allow any given village to out-compete one without gri-gri. After a time, these will either be replaced by gri-gri adherents (hence spreading it geographically), or they’ll adopt gri-gri themselves (also spreading it).

As far as “sober looks at horrifying situations” go, this is a good one. It’s clever, it’s a decent analysis of why certain beliefs persist despite being false, and I’m glad to know that economics has finally found Nietzsche.

If I have any specific criticisms, it’s that they vastly downplay negative externalities inflicted by the required rituals. They suggest, rather, that these might be positive. To use gri-gri certain commandments must be followed, and one helpful example is “don’t steal from civilians.” So far so good, and that does seem useful, but one that they don’t mention is that another form of bullet-magic requires human sacrifice and cannibalism. This might impact the cost-benefit, but I’m no economist. To be fair, they aren’t looking at Liberia, but they also want to generalize, so.

The rest is good, and I appreciate all attempts to examine “irrational” rituals. But I still think that there’s an easier and more obvious solution than theirs: gri-gri is actually magic.

See like a state for a moment.

In the absence of such a paper, most outside members would classify their beliefs as “irrational” or “stupid”. Hell, I remember people mocking this belief when I was growing up, and there are still somehow-still-considered-liberal-but-look-at-the-exotic-natives Vice documentaries about this. One can well imagine a government program to ban gri-gri, which would misunderstand its value, and therefore expose the villagers to raiding parties with no decent defense mechanism. That’s a bad idea. Try something else.

I’ll presuppose that local powers have all read the paper, recognize the importance of gri-gri, but still want to modernize. Also: human sacrifice. They decide to retain the effects, but remove the “magical” aspect as unnecessary. This presupposition is how a whole lot of people do read Seeing Like a State. You make the previously-strange beliefs legible in state language. In doing so, you assume that you have “understood them” yourself well enough to continue modernizing. The problem with High Modernism, it’s assumed, is that the capital-S State is destroying useful practices, not necessarily that it’s destroying those practices period. Retain the utility and you might as well get rid of the superstitious beliefs.

As it goes, I happen to agree with this. Interestingly, that makes me argue against every single human being who wants to do so right now. We aren’t seeing the utility, and we don’t understand the practice.

We want gri-gri, but we don’t want gri-gri. What we really want is “communal defense and associated positive externalities” minus witch-doctors. That’s not a bad plan. It rids us of the small chance of associated human sacrifice, which is always a good thing to avoid (probably). To achieve this, the state sends a researcher into the village. “We’re sorry,” he says. “We were so stupid to mock you. We totally understand why you do this thing. Let’s explain to you what’s actually going on, now that we have an economic translation.”

The researcher explains that, in fact, gri-gri doesn’t work for the individual, but it has the net-positive effect of saving the community. “Give up these childish illusions, yet maintain the overall function of the system,” he exhorts. A villager, clearly stupid, asks: “So it works?” The man smiles at these whimsical locals. “Oh, no,” he sighs. “You will surely die. But in the long run it’s a positive adaptation at the group level.”

No one would fight, of course. The effect only comes from the individual. If he doesn’t think he can survive a bullet, then it’s hard to see how you’re going to make him fight. “But people fight better in groups, don’t you see?” stammers the exasperated researcher. That’s true as far as it goes, but it’s also no revelation. I trust that at least a couple of those villagers have brawled before. “Fighting six guys alone vs. fighting six guys with your friends” is a fast lesson with obvious application. Still didn’t make them go to war before the introduction of gri-gri. If that didn’t work, why do you think “time for some #gametheory” will convince anyone?

Gri-gri is magic, and the obvious yet world-shattering revelation is that data breaks the spell. Point one for Leo Strauss, but serious problem for the value of knowledge.

The paradox of profits, Arnold Kling argues, is that while the profits that accrue to any given individual may be unjust, the profit system itself is necessary in order to have a modern, progressive society:

Some people, like the management team that took over Freddie Mac in 2003, have enjoyed nice profits when they deserved instead to be punished. And some people, like me, benefit from luck and timing.
The bottom line, in my view, is that while the “millionaire next door” model of hard work, delayed gratification, and risk-taking has some truth to it, that model is not the whole story.

Within any one organization, you take orders from a boss. Your only alternative is to leave that organization and find another boss or start your own organization.

Profits determine the success or failure of different organizations. Organizations that earn profits can continue to operate. Organizations that fail to earn profits have to go out of business, unless they can survive on donations or subsidies.

The profit system helps to discipline bosses. Really bad bosses, who use resources inefficiently (including mis-use of workers), tend to perform poorly in terms of profits. This poor performance eventually gets weeded out, either by the boss’s boss or by the inability of a poorly-performing firm to stay in business.

Profits are a measure of economic sustainability. A business earns a profit if it offers to consumers something that is more valuable than the costs of the resources used by the business to provide its goods and services. For the most part, a business that earns a profit is using resources efficiently. For the most part, a business that operates at a loss is wasting resources.

[...]

It is easy for a person to say, “I do not like the market outcome of X. I want to see the government change it.” But when you say that, you are saying that you want to be the boss. And no matter how much you think you know, the chances are that you are not as wise a boss as you think you are. That goes for trained economists, too.

And even if you happen to be the one who is wise about a particular issue, there is no guarantee that the government boss will make the choice that you would make. There is also the phenomenon of “government failure,” and often it is worse than market failure.

It is easy to criticize specific outcomes. However, the alternative is not some system that works for “the people” to provide perfect justice. The alternative is some form of intervention undertaken by a specific group of persons, presumably government officials, who themselves operate with gaps in knowledge and constraints on competence. Government intervention, when it does take place, ought to aim less at trying to directly fix problems and more toward fostering competition in order to take advantage of the profit system’s self-correction mechanisms.

Gypsies living scattered in foreign countries have generally wanted to run their own communities by their own rules. Nothing stops some of them from calling themselves a “legislature” or a “court” and claiming to make laws or pass sentences. But something does stop them from trying to enforce them: from the State’s point of view, a “court” that executes an offender is just a bunch of Gypsies who got together and committed murder. So the Vlach Rom — Romanian Gypsies — organize courts called kris which enforce their sentences with threat of banishment from the community.

Gypsies traditionally believe in marime, a sort of awful pollution that infects people who don’t follow the right rituals; anyone who interacts with polluted people will become polluted themselves. Kris courts can declare the worst offenders polluted, ensuring their speedy ostracization from Gypsy society. And since non-Gypsies are polluted by default, the possibility of ostracism and forced integration into non-Gypsy society will seem intolerable:

The effectiveness of that threat [of ostracism] depends on how easily the exiled gypsy can function outside of his community. The marimé rules (and similar rules in other societies) provide a mechanism for isolating the members of the community. Gaije, non-gypsies, do not know the marimé rules and so do not and cannot obey them. It follows that they are all polluted, unclean, carriers of a contagious disease, people whom no Rom in his right mind would willingly choose to associate with; when and if such association is unavoidable it must be taken with great care. The gypsy view of gaije, reinforced by the gaije view of gypsies as uneducated and illiterate thieves and swindlers, eliminates the exit option and so empowers the kris to enforce gypsy law by the threat of exclusion from the only tolerable human society.

Hayek claimed that local knowledge favors decentralization. Socialists hoped that cybernetics — what we’d now call “IT” — would overcome this problem. Handle thinks we’re just about there:

IT and increasingly capable and sophisticated management information systems, which themselves benefit from massive economies of scale, and the management techniques they enable, has invalidated this argument. If anything, big companies now seem to have a clear advantage with regards to acquiring and leveraging “local knowledge,” and combined with the other advantages of brand recognition, size and sophistication and capacity for, e.g., rent-seeking and bearing the burden of compliance overhead, that leaves “the little, genuinely-independent guy” with zero chance in the long run.

Whenever I read a book by anyone other than David Friedman about a foreign culture, it sounds like “The X’wunda give their mother-in-law three cows every monsoon season, then pluck out their own eyes as a sacrifice to Humunga, the Volcano God”.

And whenever I read David Friedman, it sounds like “The X’wunda ensure positive-sum intergenerational trade by a market system in which everyone pays the efficient price for continued economic relationships with their spouse’s clan; they demonstrate their honesty with a costly signal of self-mutilation that creates common knowledge of belief in a faith whose priests are able to arbitrate financial disputes.”

A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire and depopulate the town almost overnight.

As Scott writes, an early city was more like a refugee resettlement camp than a modern urban area. He observes that “the pioneers who created this historically novel ecology could not possibly have known the disease vectors they were inadvertently unleashing.”

Then I ran across this observation on Twitter: “The Internet is rewiring brains and social relations. Could it be producing a civilizational nervous breakdown?” And I saw another article noting that depression in teens skyrocketed between 2010 and 2015, as smartphones took over. It made me wonder if we’re in the same boat as the neolithic cities, only for what you might call viruses of the mind: Toxic ideas that spread like wildfire.

[...]

Likewise, in recent years we’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which social media in particular allow them to spread like wildfire. Sometimes that’s good, when they’re good ideas. But most ideas are probably bad; certainly 90% of ideas aren’t in the top 10%. Maybe we don’t know the mental disease vectors that we’re inadvertently unleashing.

It took three things to help control the spread of disease in cities: sanitation, acclimation and better nutrition.

[...]

We don’t know much about the spread of ideas, or what would constitute the equivalent of intellectual indoor plumbing. (Censorship isn’t enough, as it often just promotes the spread of bad ideas that people in power like). Over time we’ll learn more. Maybe we’ll come up with something like the germ theory of disease for ideas.

And perhaps people will acclimate. Twitter is still new, and amplifies crazy opinions. People may learn to spend less time on social media or to avoid them altogether. (In Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, the elites of the future consume their news on paper, and send each other handwritten notes; electronic communication is for the plebes.) But that will take time.

Where we can do something right away is with the equivalent of nutrition. Traditional training in critical thinking — the sort of thing the humanities used to revolve around, before they became focused on “social justice” — seems like it would be a useful protective. A skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling would likely offer considerable protection against the sort of mass hysteria we seem increasingly vulnerable to. Likewise, a social consensus on important ideas — the kinds of things we used to teach in civics classes — would help.

We tend to feel an instinctive disgust toward groups with customs and manners that differ from our own. If you can overcome this instinct to feel disgust when you are around foreigners, then you can benefit from their ideas and culture. But you increase somewhat your risk of contracting disease. Peterson describes Adolf Hitler as operating on the theory that having Jews or Gypsies in a population was like having rats in a factory. He was so concerned about the disease that might be spread by such creatures that he wanted them eradicated.

That’s a huge increase in lifespan, arguably much greater than almost any single factor we know in humans.

The carriers of the gene mutation produce less PAI-1, which results in a greater tendency for blood clots to break down. Those who are homozygous (-/-) for the mutation have an even greater tendency to break down blood clots, which results in a bleeding disorder. That’s the immediate consequence of less PAI-1.

However, the heterozygous (+/-) carriers had longer telomeres, which is a sign of slower aging. They also had less diabetes risk, a 0% diabetes rate compared to 7% in non-carriers, even though body mass index was the same. And they had better cardiovascular risk markers, including lower blood pressure and lower carotid artery thickness, a measure of atherosclerosis.

Clearly, PAI-1 does a lot to promote aging, and having less of it appears to result in longer life.

It can be far worse than laziness, as overanalysis leads to the same lack of action but ALSO self-loathing.

What helped me quite a bit was studying military history, military strategy, and decisive battles (check out Blink and Jocko Willink’s Extreme Ownership).

The stories informed how I overcame paralysis by analysis. Step one is set deadlines for decisions. In warfare, you rarely have complete information, and if you wait to push certainty from 75% to 85%, say, that lag time could cause you to lose advantage and opportunity. It’s the same in many parts of life.

So I set deadlines. By X point in time, I must make a go or no-go decision, no matter how much or how little information I have. Furthermore, I try and figure out small, short-term, low-risk experiments (e.g., split testing, hiring a contractor to design mockups) I can run as “go” decisions, so that I don’t perceive action as high-risk.

So, in short: set deadlines for decisions (put them in your calendar or they aren’t real) and break large intimidating actions/projects into tiny mini-experiments that allow you to overcome fear of failure. Once you have a little momentum, the paralysis usually disappears on its own.

That is, the capitalists will try to purchase respectability and pay off potential critics that could create real trouble for their businesses by buying ‘indulgences’ in the form of funding donations for certain prominent anti-capitalists, conspicuously and prominently towing the party line in public on the most important ideological commitments, and hiring the right number of the right people for cushy sinecures. If they show they are reliable allies instead of potential threats or rivals, and put enough money where their mouths are, and use their platforms, technological savvy, and expertise to help progressives win elections (e.g. Eric Schmidt wearing his “Staff” badge at Clinton campaign HQ), then in exchange, they will be left alone, and maybe even get some special treatment, favorable coverage, and promotion instead of demonization.

The thing about this shakedown tactic, Kling adds, is that it is like paying ransom in a kidnapping:

It relieves your problem, but it increases the chances that there will be other victims. In the case of a shakedown by activists, giving them hush money relieves our problem but it hands the group more resources to go and shake down the next corporate victim.

One additional thing to keep in mind is that the overall sector is not merely rich and prestigious and full of big juicy targets, but that many of the most important companies are fundamentally media outlets that have the potential to play gatekeeper roles regarding information and to use that power to influence public opinions and perceptions, or, in the alternative, to bypass the common gatekeeping that is characteristic of the legacy media institutions, or even to become rivals using a different set of standards for information filtering.

So ACORN can shake Freddie down for some hush money, and the progressive elites will support that effort as benefiting one of their coalition’s clients, maybe holding their noses a little, but otherwise whether or not it happens is not a very important issue for them. See also the “predatory loans” settlements.

But Twitter, Google, and Facebook and now the way social informational social points are broadcast, spread, and establishes, and have all kinds of way to subtle or overtly promote or suppress and generally have “jurisdiciton” over who can say what over their platforms. And, currently, none of that power is constrained by statute or the First Amendment or threat of civil liability, which means that power over information can currently be used in ways that circumvent any of the restrictions on direct state action. Amazon and Netflix and the rest are also media institutions to the extent they produce their own content and decide which content to host or not, or in the case of Amazon which services or pages to host. And of course many of these companies recycle and repackage and deliver the content of legacy media institutions, and so can have an enormous effect not just on that industry but to shape the ideological window of accessed messages. Also, Bezos bought the Washington Post for good reason.

If everybody is having their worldview and daily passions mediated by a few private internet companies which are also fundamentally media institutions that “curate” access to all the other media instutions, then it is absolutely clear to progressive elites that these companies pose both the greatest potential threat and greatest potential opportunity in a generation to propagate their views, agenda, and aims. That makes it absolutely essential they be strongly encouraged to get fully on board with the program as soon as possible, and be made to stay on board.

Occasionally, one is going to have to hang (or threaten to hang) an admiral or two pour encourages les autres and to let everybody know who’s boss and who can bring down whom if one strays too far from the path. The obvious thing that makes every technological company liable for demonization and even legal destruction is discriminatory employment practices. Those companies really can’t do anything about that sword of Damocles hanging over their head, and so they will be playing ball to whatever extent necessary to keep it in the air, hoping they will earn the grace of some prosecutorial discretion by so doing.

Now, this permanent prosecutorial threat is a terrific way to launder state action and have ideological regulation enforcement outsourced to private entities that aren’t constrained by the First Amendment or other rules. If non-progressives don’t grasp the overall situation soon and do something about it, then their futures will not be very bright.

The Tao Te Ching does show up a lot in both books. It also didn’t click for me for decades, and even now, I often think to myself: Am I just reading fortune cookie riddles?

So, you’re not alone!

I think this book opens more internal doors, or sparks more original insights, if you’re someone whose had at least 3-5 years of deep experience with meditation, psychedelics, or slow tai chi. It seems to depend on time spent in certain altered states. This probably sounds odd, and I could be wrong, but it’s something I’ve observed in myself and across dozens of others.

My and Josh Waitzkin’s preferred translation is by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, but this book can be confusing or seem like a dead end no matter what.

I might suggest first trying out a few other “manuals for life” that also pop up a lot across the 130+ people in Tribe of Mentors, etc. like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca, or even Zorba The Greek. Dune is also a common recommendation by incredible leaders who think certain characters exemplify excellent leadership.

For years the press has been telling us that industries that hire mostly men must be bad for women, Steve Sailer notes:

Instead, however, we see that careers where women are most abundant and most ambitious, such as television and movies, are where they are most exploited.

Why? It’s simple supply and demand.

Conversely, just as women got the vote way back in 1870 in the frontier states of Wyoming and Utah because cowboys wanted to encourage schoolmarms to migrate, women tend to be treated rather well by lonely male employees in industries where they are rare.

For example, secretaries at midcentury Lockheed Aircraft, such as my mother and her friends, tended to do quite well for themselves in acquiring husbands. After my mother was widowed when her Marine first husband was killed in combat on Iwo Jima in early 1945, she found my engineer father. They were married from 1946 until her death in 1998.

My father wasn’t a genius engineer. His career was spent figuring out how to keep the more brilliant designers’ envelope-pushing airplanes, such as the F-104, from crashing. And he was socially awkward. But he was a good man.

My mother’s best friend married another engineer, Henry Combs. They were married from 1948 until her death in 2013. Ben Rich called Henry a “genius” in his superb memoir Skunk Works about Lockheed’s legendary R&D wing that Rich led. Combs became the technical director of the Skunk Works and, according to Rich, was the chief designer of the 2,000-mph SR-71, the most awesome airplane ever built.

The founder of the Skunk Works, Kelly Johnson, America’s most famous aeronautical engineer, married a girl in the Lockheed accounting department in 1937. When she was dying in 1969, she explained to Kelly that he was too busy to take care of himself, so she had arranged for him to marry his secretary, which he did. When his second wife was dying, she in turn found a third wife for him.

But that was Kelly Johnson in the bad old days in a conservative industry. In contrast, in progressive media industries in feminist 2017, alpha males like Weinstein and Rose treat women more like Ismail the Bloodthirsty did.

The female sex has shown that their emotional responses have not yet evolved to deal well with modern visual media. Women tend to be too impressed by the men on screen and too hell-bent to get themselves on screen.

In one of Philip Roth’s lesser novels, The Dying Animal, the narrator is a 62-year-old college professor who seduces one of his undergraduate students every semester and then discards her for a new one the following semester. How does the old dog do it? He moonlights on the local PBS channel as an arts expert for a few minutes per week. This might not seem like much fame, but for a 19-year-old coed, Roth’s narrator explains, “They are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be.”

Indeed, I have relocated to Austin TX. After 17 years or so, I decided to leave Silicon Valley.

This answer could be a mini-novel, but suffice to say, here are a few reasons:

1) I wanted to move to Austin after college but didn’t get the job at Trilogy Software. Since 2007, I’ve visited Austin every year and felt the pull to move there each time. It a wonderful exploding scene of art, music, film, tech, food, and more. The people are also — in general — much friendlier.

2) After effectively “retiring” from angel investing 2 years ago, I have no professional need to be SF or the Bay Area.

3) Silicon Valley is often a culture of cortisol, of rushing, and of fear of missing out (FOMO). There is also a mono-conversation of tech that is near impossible to avoid (much like entertainment is some parts of LA), where every dinner has some discussion of rounds of funding, investing, and who is doing what with Uber, Amazon, or someone else. This can be dodged, but it takes very real and consistent effort. I don’t want to spend 20-30% of my daily mental calories on avoiding the mono-conversation.

4) Even though Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of brilliant people I’ve found anywhere in the world, it also has the highest concentration of people who think they’re brilliant. The former are often awesome, keenly self-aware, and even self-deprecating (let’s call that 15% of the population), but the latter are often smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, and intolerable (let’s call that 60% of the population). That ratio just no longer works for me. It’s too much. This asshole inflation usually corresponds to bubbles (I’ve seen it before), when fair-weather entrepreneurs and investors flood the scene.

5) Silicon Valley also has an insidious infection that is spreading — a peculiar form of McCarthyism masquerading as liberal open-mindedness. I’m as socially liberal as you get, and I find it nauseating how many topics or dissenting opinions are simply out-of-bounds in Silicon Valley. These days, people with real jobs (unlike me) are risking their careers to even challenge collective delusions in SF. Isn’t this supposed to be where people change the world by challenging the consensus reality? By seeing the hidden realities behind the facades? That’s the whole reason I traveled west and started over in the Bay Area. Now, more and more, I feel like it’s a Russian nesting doll of facades — Washington DC with fewer neck ties, where people openly lie to one another out of fear of losing their jobs or being publicly crucified. It’s weird, unsettling, and, frankly, really dangerous. There’s way too much power here for politeness to be sustainable. If no one feels they can say “Hey, I know it makes everyone uncomfortable, but I think there’s a leak in the fuel rods in this nuclear submarine…” we’re headed for big trouble.

6) Golden Gate and tech are terrorist targets, and I don’t like being close to the bullseye. This is based on good information from friends who work full-time in threat assessment.

7) I really like the sun and SF is foggy.

8) BBQ.

9) Austin is far more dog-friendly than SF.

10) Sometimes you need to think about the “where” of happiness and change your scenery to prompt new chapters in your life.

In the end, I absolutely LOVE the Bay Area, but it’s become a perverted Bizarro world version of what attracted me there in 2000. Many of my best friends in the world are there, and it pained me to leave, but I had to relocate for my own sanity, growth, and happiness.

Prodigies, like many autistic people, have a nearly insatiable passion for their area of interest. Lauren Voiers, an art prodigy from the Cleveland area, painted well into the night as a teenager; sometimes she didn’t sleep at all before school began. That sounds a lot like the “highly restricted, fixated interests” that are part of autism’s diagnostic criteria.

Prodigies also have exceptional working memories. In a 2012 study led by one of us, Dr. Ruthsatz, all eight of the prodigies examined scored in the 99th percentile in this area. As the child physicist Jacob Barnett once put it during an interview on “60 Minutes,” “Every number or math problem I ever hear, I have permanently remembered.” Extreme memory has long been linked to autism as well. Dr. Leo Kanner, one of the scientists credited with identifying autism in the 1940s, noted that the autistic children he saw could recite “an inordinate number of nursery rhymes, prayers, lists of animals, the roster of presidents, the alphabet forward and backward.” A study on talent and autism published in 2015 in The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders found that over half of the more than 200 autistic subjects had unusually good memories.

Finally, both prodigies and autistic people have excellent eyes for detail. Simon Baron-Cohen, an autism researcher, and his colleagues have described an excellent eye for detail as “a universal feature of the autistic brain.” It’s one of the categories on the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, a self-administered test Dr. Baron-Cohen helped develop that measures autistic traits. The prodigies in Dr. Ruthsatz’s 2012 study got high marks in this trait on the test. One of the subjects, Jonathan Russell, a 20-year-old music prodigy who lives in New York, described how startled he gets when the chimes on the subway are slightly off key.

Beyond the cognitive similarities, many child prodigies have autistic relatives. In the 2012 study, half of the prodigies had an autistic relative at least as close as a niece or grandparent. Three had received a diagnosis of autism themselves when young, which they seemed to have since grown out of.

There might even be evidence of a genetic link between the conditions. In a 2015 study published in Human Heredity, Dr. Ruthsatz and her colleagues examined the DNA of prodigies and their families. They found that the prodigies and their autistic relatives both seemed to have a genetic mutation or mutations on the short arm of Chromosome 1 that were not shared by their neurotypical relatives. Despite a small sample size (the finding rested on five extended prodigy families), the data was statistically significant.

He has written a classic study of peasant resistance, Weapons of the Weak, and another on the “moral economy” of village life, where neighbors live by a system of values that derive neither from the market nor from the state. In Seeing Like a State, he explained how the modern state imposes schematic visions on the world. To administer a territory and population, it needs to standardize reality, to make it measurable by ensuring that there is one system of property ownership, one currency in circulation, a naming practice that enables bureaucrats to keep track of people (first name, last name), and so forth. What you cannot measure and monitor, you cannot rule, and so the world must become orderly and legible. This ambition can become a kind of administrative mania. Bureaucratic modes of administration — from Le Corbusier’s vision for Brasilia’s streets to Prussian state agriculture to Soviet collectivization — have run roughshod over the complexity of actual life on the ground. Such governance can be tyrannical but also ironically fragile, as the state’s selective blindness makes it a stumbling giant.

Scott’s 2009 book The Art of Not Being Governed examined Southeast Asia from the standpoint of the highland regions that have evaded imperial authority up to the present day. Whereas most stories about empire tell how the dominant power expands and asserts itself, Scott emphasizes the places where people have retained their freedom by moving up mountain valleys, staying mobile, and practicing livelihoods that are hard to track or tax. From the highlanders’ perspective, the empires lapping at their edges are peripheral, fallen places. The effect is often like reading a fantasy novel, in a very good sense: Scott leaves you with the feeling that the world is packed with more ways of life, more stories, and different kinds of heroes and villains than you encountered in history class. Although Against the Grain is not a large book, it is a kind of thematic summa of Scott’s work so far, as it reworks the entire canvas of history by reconsidering its origins through the lens of state-formation.

The conventional story of human development, he shows, is based on faulty chronology. It turns out that cultivating grain — long thought to be the crucial step from roaming to civilization — does not naturally lead people to stay put in large settlements. New archaeological evidence suggests that people planted and harvested grain as part of a mix of food sources for many centuries, perhaps millennia, without settling into cities. And there were, in fact, places where people did settle down and build towns without farming grain: ecologically rich places, often wetlands bordering the migration routes of birds and animals, where foraging, fishing, and hunting made for a good life in all seasons. There is nothing about grain that fastens humanity’s foot to the earth, as President John Quincy Adams put it in one of the innumerable retellings of the standard story.

Grain is special, but for a different reason. It is easy to standardize — to plant in rows or paddies, and store and record in units such as bushels. This makes grain an ideal target for taxation. Unlike underground tubers or legumes, grain grows tall and needs harvesting all at once, so officials can easily estimate annual yields. And unlike fugitive wild foods, grain creates a relatively consistent surplus, allowing a ruling class to skim off peasant laborers’ production through a tax regime of manageable complexity. Grain, in Scott’s lexicon, is the kind of thing a state can see. On this account, the first cities were not so much a great leap forward for humanity as a new mode of exploitation that enabled the world’s first leisured ruling class to live on the sweat of the world’s first peasant-serfs. As for writing, that great gateway to history, Scott reports that its earliest uses suggest it was basically a grain-counting technology. Literary culture and shared memory existed in abundance both before and after the first pictographs and alphabets — consider Homer’s epics, the products of a nonliterate Greek “dark age” before the Classical period. Writing contributed a ledger of exploitation.

Scott’s retelling, however, goes deeper than scrambling the chronology and emphasizing the dark side of early institutions. Life in cities, he argues, was probably worse than foraging or herding. City dwellers were vulnerable to epidemics. Their diets were less varied than those of people on the outside. Unless they were in the small ruling class, they had less leisure, because they had to produce food not just for their own survival, but also to support their rulers. Their labor might be called on to build fortresses, monuments, and those ever-looming walls. Outside the walls, by contrast, a fortunate savage or barbarian might be a hunter in the morning, a herder or fisherman in the afternoon, and a bard singing tales around the fire in the evening. To enter the city meant joining the world’s first proletariat.

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Adar: This kind of behavior is quite common today, too. The Palestinians, when talking to foreigners, make quite rational and reasonable demands of the Israelis. When the Palestinians talk in their own media to their own people the message is much more hostile and extreme. Mexican revanchists too are the same way. When speaking to the gringo their demands and aspirations are so very reasonable, fair, and rational. In the media of the Mexican revanchists, the language used is much more extreme and...

Bob Sykes: What is more important is that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, Che et al. get a pass. There are no films or novels depicting or describing the horrors committed by communists. It’s all Hitler, Hitler, Hitler all the time. Stalin actually killed Jews, too, but we don’t know how many.

Faze: At some point more of an exciting lark rather than serious revolutionary fervor. In ALL cases an exciting lark, Lu An Li. I witnessed no “serious revolutionary fervor” among the 60s radicals I knew. It was a big game of cowboys and Indians to us.

Lucklucky: Revolution is a tool for Social Competition and at same time giving meaning to their lives. Extreme Narcissism. I also think there is a tendency that societies with fast growth lead to war. Leads to optimism and the dream to change the world. Purification. Revolutionaries have a lot of free time…

Lu An Li: These American Sixties radicals really also got a rush out of being counter-culture and some of them such the Weather Underground being able to fool and evade the FBI. At some point more of an exciting lark rather than serious revolutionary fervor.

Harry Jones: Anything that a right to exist must thereby be ceded the right to defend itself against an existential threat. That’s what the right to exist in practice. But a revolutionary does not recognize the government’s right to exist. It’s not even a secret. Any government that doesn’t seek to exterminate those who would destroy it is stupid. I would argue that a regime that stupid has by its stupidity forfeited the right to exist. The world can do without stupid governments....

With the thoughts you'd be thinkin: Seeing how revolutionary misbehaviour in Tsarist Russia has perked your interest, have you ever considered reading Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore? Basically it’s about Stalin before he became Stalin, so it follows him through many endeavours such as his role as a Georgian national poet, role as a gang leader and terrorist, escapee from Siberian exile, and much more. You’d be shocked with what he got away with. Link related is a bank robbery that he...

Alrenous: It never occurs to these memoirists that their motives are entirely selfish. Selfish communists, who think communism will work because humans aren’t really selfish, is condemned by writer who expect/demands human communists not be so selfish.

Kirk: LOL… Did you miss that the terrorists were the government, after Lenin took over? Not to mention that the interregnum between the Tsars like Ivan the Terrible and Communists was filled with men who were cruel and tyrannical, but who still had some cavils against the measures of Ivan and Lenin, who managed to nearly totally suppress non-state terrorists by the simple measure of co-opting them into state service. Russia is a tragedy; I’m not sure that the conventional wisdom that...

Sam J.: “…the public trust had been broken long before by despotic Tsars and their boyars. You treat your citizenry like the Russian state habitually did (and, still does…)…” Nah. If this is so why not mass terrorism in the USSR, Lenin, Stalin?? Much worse by orders of magnitude. “…Veronika succumbs, but it is not love of the people that convinces her. Rather, she cannot resist the “precariousness and poignancy of life in the underground, a life that was really a...

Kirk: There is something to be said for the idea that the Russian state was dealing with fundamentally irrational people–And,to us, that certainly seems to be so, from our perspective today. Throwing acid in the face of policemen, or other government officials? Insane. Yet… What had the despotic government of the Tsars done before all that, which convinced the Russian people that such behavior was a rational choice? In order to understand the entire situation, you need to examine everything;...

Harry Jones: That’s not divine protection, exactly. The universe rewards those who are nimble and clever at evading attacks, but only for a while. If an enemy keeps coming at you, sooner or later he will get you, no matter how masterfully you foil his attacks. The only escape is to get him first. Dodging bullets buys time, but only so much time. Defense is no substitute for offense.

Harry Jones: The good Rabbi has too much faith in the good intentions of the ruling class. Me, I’m for rule of law. Let the nation earn its integrity. That said, any system of laws that prevents a just regime from surviving needs to be modified. Not ignored or subverted. Just fix the laws. Attack the problem at the right level.

Adar: “There are fateful times in the life of states when state necessity stands higher than law and one must choose between the integrity of one’s theories and the integrity of the nation.” “During a time of war all laws may be set aside, execept for murder and apostacy.” — Rabbi Akiva, around 120 A.D.

Candide III: If the strategy was to demoralize the government, it worked.Only while the government kept avoiding taking any effectual measures, perhaps from fear of appearing despotic before foreign opinion and proving true the worst foreign prejudices about Russia, perhaps partly from a disinclination to go against local public (i.e. mostly intelligentsia) opinion. Stolypin said in his speech to the II. Duma of March 13th 1907 (my translation; my comments are in brackets): We have heard here accusations...

Sam J.: Ran across this photo. Look at the massive waste of Men in WWI. Cameron Highlanders in 1914 and then after armistice. https://www.reddit.com/r /pics/comments/9w5j2q/th e_cameron_highlanders_in _1914_before_going_to/

Magus: I’m curious what the religious/ethnic breakdown of terrorists in imperial Russia was. I have my suspicions but frankly don’t know.

Adar: American communist revolutionaries of the late 1960′s their attempted recruitment efforts included convicts of the worst possible sort of offender. Most upper-middle class youth had not even cracked the proverbial eggshell during their lives and never had committed a violent act ever. Convicts were admired for their lack of restraint in using violence as a means to achieve whatever ends.